The exceptional aspects seen in most of the characters in these novels by Kourouma have links with real facts. Reading the experience of Koyaga, we can find similarities with Gnassingbé Eyadéma the former President of Togo. In the novel, the character is born in Ramaka. Eyadéma is born in Lama Kara, a small village in the north of the country. Ramaka could be an anagram of Lama Kara. Koyaga’s love of hunting and robbing the people to build up a wildlife reserve in En Attendant le Vote des Bêtes Sauvages (VBS, 317) are things which actually happened in Togo. Koyaga escapes an attempted assassination when a soldier shoots at him from point-blank range and misses (VBS, 285). Later there are two plane accidents which he miraculously survives. These two events serve to reinforce Koyaga’s mythical side but also point to Eyadéma in Togo. In 1967 he miraculously escaped the point-blank shot of a soldier who missed him. He was also involved in two plane accidents near Sarakawa in the north of Togo, one in 1973 and the other in January 1974. The second one turned Sarakawa into a place of pilgrimage. Thus Koyaga’s trajectory was almost identical to that of Gnassingbé Eyadéma. In both cases, a myth of invincibility and invulner-ability was built which made the people believe that the president was an exceptional human. Each failed rebel attempt reinforced the myth formed around the dictator, in particular the mystical aura which surrounded him.
Following the failed attack of 2003, François Soudan wrote of Eyadéma in Jeune Afrique l’Intelligent, ‘Aux yeux de nombre de Togolais, une sorte de halo méta-religieux entoure le personnage, comme si seule la maladie pouvait un jour le terrasser.’ [in the eyes of many Togolese people, a meta-religious halo surrounds the figure, as if only illness could one day bring
him down] (Soudan, 2003, 24). The well-known journalist was right, and Eyadéma was struck down by illness, rather than the multiple coups d’état against him during his presidency.
In En Attendant le Vote des Bêtes Sauvages, the narrator draws particu-lar attention to the assassination of Fricassa Santos, the President of the Republic of the Gulf. This murder has an air of great mystery, since the fight that precedes Koyaga’s victory is the one between the two talented magic students (VBS, 100). This ambiguous link to Fricassa Santos’s murder provides Koyaga with the legitimization and sense of myth that he needs, since he won power through fighting. His action comes in the wake of the sorting and rebuilding of a fair society. Koyaga presents himself as the Saviour figure come to restore a former peace which was disrupted by what he sees as a system of profiteers, injustice, and crimes. It is the exact same context that sees Eyadéma assassinate Sylvanus Olympio on 13 January 1963. That conquest distorts and transforms a horrible criminal act, turn-ing Eyadéma into a mythical character:
Le mythe proprement dit déforme le passé ; celui qui fonde le pouvoir du général Eyadéma altère le présent en le rapprochant du passé mythologique. En mythifiant ce passé tout proche, le général Eyadéma se donne le moyen d’épurer l’acte criminel qui était à l’origine de son pouvoir de tout aspect répréhensible en le présentant au peuple comme salvateur. La légitimité du pouvoir du général Eyadéma opère dans ce champ déformé et fondamentalement mythifié.
[Myth, strictly speaking, distorts the past; the foundation of general Eyadéma’s power adapts the present in drawing it closer to a mythological past. By mythifying the recent past, general Eyadéma enables himself to cleanse the criminal act, which insured his power, from any objectionable element, presenting it instead as the peo-ple’s salvation. The legitimacy of general Eyadéma’s power works in this distorted and fundamentally mythical sense.]15
As with Koyaga, the same is true of other character pairings: Tiékoroni/
Houphouët Boigny, Bossouma/Bokassa, Nkoutigui Fondio/Sekou Touré, the leopard man/Mobutu Sese Seko, the jackal man/Hassan II. Kourouma uses names to mask well-known figures. In an interview, the author admits
15 Comi Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadéma (Paris: Karthala, 1986), p. 16.
that ‘Eyadéma, le dictateur du Togo, a été un des modèles qui m’ont servi pour décrire Koyaga, le dictateur du roman’ [Eyadéma, Togo’s dictator, was one of the bases for my description of Koyaga, the dictator in the novel].16 Drawing inspiration from real people, Kourouma also ridicules the different presidents included in his novels. This can be seen in the names he gives his characters. When speaking about Bossouma in En Attendant le vote des Bêtes Sauvages, the narrator always highlights the smell of excrement that accompanies the character. Looking at character names reveals the correlations between Bossouma in the text and Bokassa in real life. In the novel, the narrator explains the meaning of Bossouma: this name means
‘puanteur de pet’ [fart stench] in Malinké (VBS, 208). But, according to the Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire, Bokassa means the same thing. With these transitive links, Bossouma and Bokassa are synonyms. By playing with meanings, Kourouma draws a subtle but direct link between the fictional character and the real life person. The author explains his choice to ridicule his characters in an interview with Jean-Fernand Bédia. He speaks about Tiékoroni (Houphouët-Boigny):
Tièkoroni, ça veut dire, c’est petit […]. C’est le diminutif de Tièkoroba.[…] Quand on dit Tièkoroni, c’est dans le but de réduire l’importance de la personne. Il y a une ironie terrible. Tièkoroni, ça signifie deux choses: d’abord, il est vieux, mais surtout quelqu’un qui est petit en taille. En outre, il est combinard. Il n’est pas franc, il n’est pas clair. C’est tout le contraire de Tièkoroba qui incarnerait la vérité, la sagesse.
[Tiékoroni means little […] It’s the diminutive form of Tièkoroba […] When you say Tiékoroni, it’s in order to reduce a person’s importance. There’s a terrible irony.
Tiékoroni means two things: firstly, he is old, but mostly it describes somebody who is small. But he’s also a schemer. He is not candid, nor clear. He’s the total opposite of Tièkoroba who embodied truth and wisdom.]17
The author intentionally gives the name as a summary of the character (in the novel, Tiékoroni is a short, old man, a liar and a dictator). But according
16 Armel, Arliette, ‘Ahmadou Kourouma: «Je suis toujours un opposant»’, Magazine Littéraire n° 390, pp. 98–102, 2000 (99).
17 Jean-Fernand Bédia, ‘Janjon pour Ahmadou Kourouma’, Africultures (65), October 2005 <http://www.africultures.com? accessed 25 May 2018.
to the author, the real life referent shares the same characteristics. Knowing that Houphouët-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast, was presented as a monument of wisdom, we understand Kourouma’s irony in deconstructing the myth and mystery around his character.
In Allah n’est pas obligé, Kourouma uses the names of real people.
Reading the book, we recognize the well-known names of Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe, Prince Johnson, Foday Sankoh, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and Johnny Paul Koroma. In the armed conflicts of Sierra Leone or Liberia, they always emphasized their stature as strong men with exceptional powers.
So as well as characters who stand before the people as redeemer figures come to re-establish a disrupted order, Kourouma depicts the real actors of Africa’s history.
Kourouma makes these choices to shed new light on the dealings of certain historical figures who use fantasy to shape the people’s thinking.
The author himself does not believe in all these imaginary manoeuvres:
Je ne crois pas au fétichisme. Pour une raison très simple: si ce qu’avançait la magie était vrai, notre histoire ne serait pas aussi tragique ! […] Si les Africains avaient réel-lement le pouvoir que leur promet la magie, ils n’auraient pas accepté l’esclavage, ni la colonisation. La tradition explique que si la magie ne réussit pas toujours, c’est à cause d’une faute commise dans le rituel. Le malheur viendrait d’une erreur dans la méthode utilisée dans la pratique fétichiste. Mais je n’y crois pas.
[I don’t believe in fetishism. For one simple reason: if magic could really make a difference, then our history wouldn’t be so tragic! […] If African people really had the power that magic claims to offer, they wouldn’t have accepted either slavery or colonization. Tradition explains that if magic doesn’t always work, it’s because of a mistake made in the ritual. Misfortune is supposedly because of a mistake in the method of fetishist practice. But I don’t believe it.]18
Thus we understand that myths, fetishes, and other totems present in the postcolonial societies of Kourouma’s novels are to be understood as imagi-nary, rather than having any hold on the writer’s reality.
18 Armel, Ahmadou Kourouma, p. 100.
Conclusion
Close reading of Kourouma’s novels allows us to see several characters using animals as totems to protect them from adversity. As well as this protec-tion, these figures adopt all the characteristics of the animals. Displaying those characteristics, as well as recounting their unusual childhoods and expertise in hunting, make them stand out as exceptional beings. Yet as we have seen, the totems and myths are distorted for personal gain in these fractured, post-independence societies. Systems of propaganda vali-date the mythical images of leaders who present themselves as Messiah, come to save the people from injustice, corruption, and every kind of evil.
Hammering these distorted images home has immeasurable consequences for the psyche of those citizens who believe the lies. But as this analysis has shown, certain characters retain enough lucidity to reveal the huge flaws in these dictatorial regimes. Through name choices, Ahmadou Kourouma has his narrators ridicule these characters, in turn undoing the myths and mystery that surrounds them. Beyond the fictional characters, we have seen links with many actors from African history. The parallels I have drawn reveal just how close the fictional events are to the real ones. In this way, the novel becomes a space to invert those falsely mythical images that many African dictators have disseminated and continue to show off throughout their reigns.
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